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The Geneva Bible (first published 1560) was the dominant English Protestant household Bible before the Authorized King James Version (published 1611); scholars estimate roughly 15–20% of the KJV’s wor...
Shakespeare's texts supply the first recorded use of many English words and helped normalize countless phrases that remain in everyday speech; scholars estimate he introduced or popularized roughly 1,...
The best-supported answers say Shakespeare is credited with introducing somewhere between roughly 1,700 and nearly 3,000 words to English, but that figure is a shorthand for “earliest recorded use in ...
Antisemitic stereotypes that portray Jews as disproportionately powerful — especially in media, finance and politics — have roots in centuries-old libels and forged conspiracies, and persist today thr...
King John (reigned 1199–1216) was the youngest son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine who succeeded his brother Richard I and presided over the loss of most Angevin lands in France and a domestic cr...
Reported prevalence of cuckolding — whether as historical practice, extra-pair paternity (EPP), or a modern fetish — varies widely across time and place, and the literature shows change largely in vis...
Shakespeare supplies both the stock phrases politicians and media reach for—“Et tu, Brute?”, “friends, Romans, countrymen”, “sceptered isle”—and a suite of lexical inventions (assassination, addiction...
The Geneva Bible’s broad popular readership and its distinctive marginal notes shaped the King James translators’ work both as a linguistic source to be consulted and as a political target to be neutr...